Is it Safe to Be a Boy?

When I was a girl, it would have been nice if my world had been nicer to girls.
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Back then, if you got praised it was for being unobtrusive and doing your domestic chores. For staying inside the box where you belonged. Your mother’s highest compliment was, “Aren’t you a good little housewife!” Punishments were harsh and rewards were demeaning. If you weren’t a pretty child, you’d hear the grown-ups worrying about it. Your father might have been proud of your cleverness in science or spelling, but once you passed age twelve, he kind of lost track of where you were inside your head. 

It takes decades, and dozens of personal battlegrounds, hundreds of social missteps and several thousand miles of riding a motorbike to find another place, to recognize yourself outside the identity assigned to you. Is it wrong to be glad you gave birth to boys and not girls, for fear of subtly, subliminally extending this hereditary chain of mother-daughter disempowerment? For fear that you might not quite know how to parent a girl?

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